Letters -- Published March 14, 2013

Thursday

Mar 14, 2013 at 12:01 AM

As a retired Pacific faculty member, I am very disappointed, to put it mildly, that the university has invited Condoleezza Rice as a guest speaker on campus for the Women's Leadership Forum on March 21.

As a retired Pacific faculty member, I am very disappointed, to put it mildly, that the university has invited Condoleezza Rice as a guest speaker on campus for the Women's Leadership Forum on March 21.

I have never supported censorship, but she is a very poor choice, and I wish Pacific had shown better judgment. Rice is very articulate, which makes her public record all the worse.

As far as I recall, she's been wrong on every major foreign issue for about the past quarter-century. Above all, she was one of the leading Bushites who lied to us in the run-up to invading Iraq, using fear-inducing language like looming "mushroom clouds" to encourage military action, the neocons' long-held vision.

Given the thousands of U.S. lives lost and people maimed facing dire consequences when they come home (often to criminally delayed treatment) and many more Iraqis killed or injured, Rice has blood on her hands.

Unlike Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who emotionally later acknowledged his terrible mistakes, and emulating Richard Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, Rice has not acknowledged, much less apologized for, these bloody errors of language and judgment. So much for supporting the troops, that shining example of bumper-sticker patriotism. I also write these words as a vet.

Since I do not believe in the equivalent of washing dirty laundry, this letter was preceded by about a week of one to Pacific President Pamela Eibeck, approximately the same as this one.

Paul J. Hauben

Stockton

I noticed with great interest a March 4 article in The Record, "U.S. to give $250 million in aid to Egypt."

This gift in American aid is to support the country's future as a democracy. We seem to be a giving and caring nation even though we are trillions of dollars in national debt.

It seems time to reverse this situation by asking countries that we aided in the past to repay these debts, because this will support the U.S. efforts to become a country with a future as a democracy.

Jay R. Sorensen

Stockton

When the Obama administration's health care financing plan was signed into law, President Barack Obama and Congress promised that funds under the new law would not cover abortions.

This has now been proven to be empty rhetoric.

Why? Because the Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that under the health care law, private health insurance plans must cover the "full range of FDA-approved contraception" - in which category HHS explicitly included the drug Ella.

This mandate includes a so-called "religious employer exemption," yet the exemption is so narrowly defined that most religious schools, colleges, hospitals and charitable organizations serving the public do not qualify. Even an expanded definition of "religious employer" would fail to protect non-religiously affiliated organizations, individuals and even religiously affiliated health insurers whose pro-life consciences are nonetheless violated.

This is an unprecedented attack on the freedom of conscience of millions of Americans, eviscerating their freedom of choice to purchase private insurance that does not violate their ethical, moral or religious objections.

I hope all readers will contact their elected representatives in Washington, D.C., and voice outrage over this anti-life mandate.

Donald Johnson

French Camp

» NOTE: Ella (ulipristal acetate) is among a number of morning-after emergency contraceptive pills approved in recent years by the federal Food and Drug Administration.